Nanjing, 1937

[the_grynne]

Do you know Chinese from Japanese? If not, then don't make the presumption either way, because neither will be very pleased if you make the mistake.

Daniel McNeill at Asia Times Online, "The Rape and Revision of Nanjing":
'A crop of new movies released to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the Nanjing Massacre is set to again dredge up the

Comments

[kenorland]

Nanking. I also enjoy the denial about the treatment of Korean comfort women. Obviously I'm not Korean, but that rankles very personally.

[the_grynne]

Australians aren't too happy about it either. There are still surviving WW2 veterans who speak out that the Japanese were never held to account for how they treated Allied POWs captured in the Pacific.

Related: The Spielberg-produced companion series to Band of Brothers, The Pacific, is now filming in Melbourne. There was an article in The Age about the production hiring lots of school kids as extras. It should add another voice to the history of the war in the Pacific.

[kenorland]

While I don't want any representation to demonize the Japanese, what galls me about all this -- apart from the undeniable belief in racial superiority lying at the heart of all this Japanese government war crimes-denial (GOD, inter-Asian relations are SO RACIST so often, it makes me crazy) -- is that, because Japan is such an economic giant, it has been able to obfuscate these war crimes. Like, they have literally been able to afford to forget, because China, Korea, the Philippines, etc. have all been relatively insignificant on the world stage. The rich people get away with things -- again.

Surely if there had been no American POWs in the Philippines, that would have been totally forgotten, too. But NANJING, man. There is PHOTOGRAPHIC EVIDENCE. Jesus Christ, it's basically Holocaust denialism.

Sigh.

[the_grynne]

The rich people get away with things -- again.

Yes, and, not surprisingly, the resurgence of the academic revisionist in Japan who deny the atrocities coincides with Japan's economic decline of the last decade and a half. They won't be able to dodge the bullet for much longer, I suspect.

GOD, inter-Asian relations are SO RACIST so often, it makes me crazy

Asia is a bit like Africa in that respect. In fact, it was hard not to be reminded of inter-ethnic violence in Rwanda.